Neptune's Aphrodite
by SurfingSpider
Summary: Sylia takes the Knight Sabres out on Christmas Eve to a nightclub, and goaded by Priss enters the ocean of dancers where she encounters a nemesis.
1. Chapter 1

"Priss!" Linna shouted, squirming through the pulsating mass of partygoers. She stretched out trying to reach her friend, swept away out of reach and swelled back again with the living tide.

Priss reached for her. Their fingers twined, hands clasped, and the brunette maned singer, experienced in the rips and eddies, pulled the office lady between the kelpian wave close to her.

"Thanks," Linna breathed hard.

Priss, as manic-eyed as any of Davy Jones' drowning victims, grinned ferociously back, startling Linna with its intensity. Against her Priss began dancing, shimmying her shoulders, pressed as they both were, carried along flotsam and jetsam.

Priss buoyed Linna with her motion keeping her from slipping beneath. Priss' legs were like a tail, wrapped around Linna's sheer coated runs. The singer's lean arms directed them through the storm, brushing aside rhythmless debris.

Ocean blue was a siren. Linna could not resist the silent call, her eyes, the touch, her feel and smell of the sea. As long as she stayed pressed against the deep was calm, the storm eyed, the flashing lightning and booming thunder maddening around but silent and still as glass when she was lost.

Infection spread synchronicity. As skinsuit to boomer melded mind and body, Priss to Linna sparked their atoms, a new heart-light periodic element fusion that could resist all forces.

Even the tsunami of a singles xmas eve party.

Linna wished she could grab and hold. Her hands moved, Priss caught and redirected them, twisting Linna around. Experienced breath ran along the back of Linna's neck. She tried to turn her head and retain eyes. Priss moved to the other side leaving her face in that mane, washed in wave's spray.

Priss made her move with smoothness and grace so different, and exhilarating, than the athletic training that had made her so deadly a boomer hunting Knight Sabre and as unlike Priss' own brutal fighting style, a reflection of the Replicant's anarchopunk. It would be something to ask when there were air filled lungs for it, where was this Priss from?

The storm did not abate. The waves did not calm. They rose up, they curled onto the foamy lip, and fell into the psychedelic tube of light and smoke and people twisting around and around. At that moment Linna felt her strength begin to fade; Priss, the lost legs sagging onto her for support pulled Linna tight and close and with a free hand, and eyes and jaw setting to the Hot Legs growler, remorselessly powered the writhing seaweeds.

They came free.

Priss let Linna sag completely exhausted, sweat drowned, into the booth as Nene scooted aside and Sylia looked on bemused, as was her want to, the lip of a salt-encrusted cocktail poised on the lip of her rogue.

"Linna, are you okay? Priss, is Linna okay?" Nene hurried.

Priss, clothes stuck tighter than one of Sylia's sapphic minded skinsuits, makeup black streaming, drenched simply, "I'll get her a drink." Said so simply.

"No need, dear Priss," Sylia said picking up her phone, "I'll just order anything you need over. Going to the bar is for plebians."

Priss sat, wet on leather, with difficulty. "Too kind. I'll have scotch then."

Nene gasped.

"Did you have to wear her out so early?" Sylia twisted a wrist to look at her charm watch. "It's only two."

"That explains why I'm yawning so much." Nene said.

"Then go out there," Priss pointed, "Wake you up."

"No thanks," Nene retreated. She checked Linna's perspiring forehead. Cold and hot. She looked for a napkin to wipe her hand with.

"What about you, Sylia?" Priss took Sylia's triangle shaped glass and drank – too much – managed to turn a splutter into a rasp recovery.

Sylia laughed. "If I could dessous dress even a quarter of the girls here, my holiday target would be met."

"Is that why you suggested this, clientele?" Priss squirmed into a better position. So was wet enough to stick and as she cooled, the feeling of drawing leather and cloth from skin was as unpleasant as ever.

Alcohol would warm. Restore the balance.

"Just a girls night out. You're enjoying it." Sylia looked to Linna. "She is, dedicated."

"Dinner would have bee fine," Nene mumbled.

"Probably," Priss agreed. "But not like last time."

Nene blushed and sagged.

"Ooohh," Linna groaned, "Is that why we did nothing last year?"

Sylia caught the way Priss looked at Linna. It made her smile, and be a little jealous. Those two didn't need a singles night. The competition to be the Knight Sabre with the most boomer kills was competitive bond enough to exclude the emotional, mental, and physical connection that, 'two peas in a pod' Nene had once remarked cringe-cutely, obliviously. Poor little Nene.

Still, attention turned to the dance floor, there was a call there. Did she have the fortitude to withstand the graveyard of rejected vessels battering her hull from all sides? She had no Priss to save her. Priss would see if she would drown, sinking in a whirlpool of lost bodies. Sylia could bend people. Could she bend a current? Could she, aphrodite rise?

Nene was talking to Linna. Linna was in a swoon and trying to get Priss' attention. Priss, newly cocktail impaired, had lost her focus between Linna, her drink, Sylia, and the call of the sea.

Sylia could study her girls all day and night. She knew what motivated each of them. What they did. What they liked and disliked. What they would do if there were no Knight Sabres or boomers to destroy. Sylia was certain, despite their divergent circles, that they would have met each other still and that this night would have happened, Gemon or no.

The irony. Why she had chosen a singles party, on christmas eve, in a country that had truly commercialised it, for a bangle forged unbreakable. No man or woman, boomer or supranational corrupting corporation could break any one of them away. Nene, Linna, Priss, herself, they were not single alone. They were single together. The double irony, a joke on her clever self just realised, the erotic fascination of who could handle four together.

Sylia crossed her legs. Ordinarily, she'd call Nigel to let out her steam. But, her own admission, this night was young, Christmas had come, and her girls would still want to stay out. She wanted to stay out.

"Perhaps, Priss," Sylia uncrossed her legs, the silk of her grey-green skirt, cut to thigh high, shimmering as sun hit waves, "I will."

"Huh?" Priss grunted, not in Sylia's context, and killing the buzz that she'd been feeling.

"Nene, look after Linna, order whatever you want." Sylia stood up. She looked down at Priss. "Coming?"

Priss took a moment the gulped the last of the cocktail down, searing her throat and watering her eyes. She stood up.

Sylia removed her bolero jacket, fleeced the tucked in satin chemise out.

"Y'know, Sylia, I've never even seen you dance. Are you sure you're up to that?" the tidal waves.

Sylia said nothing, she walked to the shore, and, Priss catching up, waded into the swell.


	2. Chapter 2

Sylia was carried away almost instantly. The rip pulled her in and almost under. She raised her arms to keep afloat, buffeted from one side and other by liquid bodies and shadowed faces. She lost sight of the shore, hazed behind the salt spray, lights of the sky and booms of the depths.

Priss managed to reach her, riding in on a peaking wave. Her mouth moved, shouting, Slyia could not hear her. Green and red and blue lights turned her drowned.

Her biker-chick reached out, just as she had to Linna earlier, expecting a similar response. Sylia did not. She did not want – need – the help. The fingers closed on empty air, Sylia let herself be pulled back further, away, to chance on the fates by herself. Priss shouted. Angrily.

Sylia turned and was surrounded by a wave taller of sea-frond hands swaying high above her head. She moved through them without pattern. The fate of becoming entwined was mortal.

On she went, deeper, further until she came up to the barrier of a wall. Above and below multicoloured lights spun and strobed.

She touched her forehead and it was damp with sweat, own and others shaken on. Her feet ached, thighs tremoured and breath heaved, a shipwrecked survivor pulling themselves onto a raft of live-saving debris.

To return she would have to endure it again.

And she had willingly entered. Just to show Priss that she could, wasn't burnt out, or only a talker.

Her smile was a grimace.

Wait here for a little while to recover and let the storm ebb. But the minutes did not make her legs stop trembling or the ache of her feet, inappropriately heeled, and the tropic sweat did not stop and her breathing was still hard and heaving and tethered to the beat.

The worst would be if Priss came and had to drag her back. Linna returned under her own steam, mostly. It would not do for her to be rescued.

She would have to bear it, plunge in cold and keep swimming and emerge, Ursula, from the rolling swell a triumphant aphrodite. To show them that she was the leader for a reason.

In another minute. The light and sound and loss of salt and water pounded against her temple. The wall was reassuring.

The crests looked higher and higher. She found that she was indeed slipping beneath and the images before her eyes danced and swam as truly as the deepest pressure of the pool that ran top to bottom of her store and apartment.

Her hands had no purchase to keep her up. There was no strength in her arms to reach out and take one of the aquarians. Alone she was going to drown.

"Sylia,"

She heard it in her head.

"Sylia."

A hand took her chin. Cold, ice cold.

The jolt threw Sylia's fading eyes wide.

The raven. Mirror. Deep sea green eyes, castaway pallid flesh pulled from the lightless depths.

"Gal-"

"at-"

"ea."

Another arm, as coiling as an octopus' tentacle wrapped around her waist and reversed her decline.

"Im-"

"Possible." Galatea finished.

"How?"

Buried in the earthquake. The city destroyed. Genom rising, boomers proliferating, rogue increasing, Mason scheming, the hunt.

"I am your present, Sylia."

Sylia shook her head and blinked. Hallucination. She had lost control of her mind.

Galatea smiled. She let go of Sylia's chin and held the hand palm up before them. "It's Christmas, sister-mother. I am your present. I will be given to you, soon, wrapped in a cocoon as silver as the hairs of your head. You will open me, the Gift that your father had wanted to give himself."

"Father,"

"Isn't Christmas the time for gifts? Frankincense and myrrh? Gifts for a King. Me? I am the gift to make Gods. Wasn't that what your father wanted, to be God? As God gave His son, he gave his daughter."

"I don't understand," was all Sylia could say, feebly.

She was held upright, standing, with what could not exist, a face her own and dark. Galatea was trapped beneath the city ruins, a formless embryo, not a woman as tall, as cruel, as what she was, felt, understood through layers of concrete, metal and bedrock. Galatea could not be here.

Airless, Galatea's mouth spoke: "Your father left me to you. The time is coming to find me, Sylia. Others are looking, I am not for them. I was always only for you to open."

"And then what?"

Green lips smiling.

"You will have a sibling. God only had a Son. Our world will have two Daughters and Mothers to guide their children."

Hair black, hair silver, floated about their faces.

"Open you. Not here."

Sylia's arms jerked, grabbing Galatea, who did not react, still smiled back. Physical. She was there. Cold, not human. Give, before uniform firmness.

"It is time to open your present," Galatea's voice drifted distant.

"Not here!" boomer.

Galatea was not here. She was holding onto a boomer.

The reflected visage pebble drop rippled. Galatea was no more, replaced by an ordinary looking female hospitality boomer.

"Can I take you back to your booth, Ms. Stingray?" the boomer said in metallic femininity.

"No, wait."

It was not a hallucination. The boomer was here. It had her face. Galatea had controlled it. From wherever she was buried she had reached out and taken control of the boomer, found her, and saved her.

And given her a message.

Sylia's was hers to find.

She was not the only one who would be looking.

"Lead the way," Sylia said to the boomer and was lead through the parting waters back to her booth where the three other girls of the Knight Sabres sat.

"Look what the dolphin dragged in," Priss said tartly.

As Slyia passed the boomer to sit down with her friends, rest, and drink heavily, it said Galatea's voice: "Merry Christmas."


End file.
